I got a quick glimpse of Quito, Ecuador from the air. The whole city was all sprawled out at the bottom of a bunch of giant, pyramid-shaped mountains, jammed into every nook and cranny, but then suddenly split up by veins of intense bright greenery. From the back seat of the car Alan and Maddy hustled me into once we landed, the base of the mountains filled the gap between every building I saw, looming out above the haze of the city.
Out of the airport and on the road our driver dodged cars, buses crammed up full with people, and taxis who used their horns like Morse code.
“Can I use a phone?” I asked.
Every once in a while as the car passed between high rise buildings framed by green slopes as we approached the edge of the city, I could see a long silver thread that broke through the low lying clouds over Quito and dropped all the way down to the ground north of the city.
That silver thread touched down at Mitad Del Mundo, right north of Quito where equator split the world into north and south. From there it climbed up into the sky, all the way to the All Tree itself.
No one was getting up to the All Tree by rocket. That was the human way. I had assumed some kind of spaceship would come down to land and pick us up, but as we’d gotten up to New Mexico thanks to Yggdrasil, we’d seen the videos of the long silver thread lowering itself down to the ground in Ecuador.
The scientists called it a ‘space elevator.’ A few hours later a climber slid down it to touch the ground at Mitad Del Mundo, and when it opened up all of Earth watched as aliens stepped out onto Earth’s soil for the first time.
It would be one of those climbers that we were supposed to get on board to go up to the All Tree.
But I wouldn’t be getting on one until I talked to my parents once more. Maddy and Alan had remained silent. I knew that they couldn’t tell me now that phones didn’t work here. I could see people on the sides of streets talking on phones everywhere.
“I need to talk to my parents on the phone before we get there,” I said.
Alan and Maddy couldn’t pretend not to hear me again. They glanced at each other.
“We don’t have time, Kadie,” Alan said.
I gritted my teeth. Something wasn’t right. And I wasn’t going to get aboard the All Tree until I had more answers. They could give me a phone. The doors were locked, I noted.
This was all wrong.
“The drugs, I think they making me sick,” I moaned as the car slowed in almost-stalled traffic. I coughed into my hands. I shoved a finger back up my throat as I did so, and I threw up a little into my hands.
Nasty.
When I sat back up with my hands cupping nasty smelling bile, Maddy and Alan both pulled back. “Open the window!” I begged Maddy as I leaned over her, ready to make a mess of her clothes.
The driver slowed the car down, but Alan slammed the back of his seat hard. “Don’t stop the car,” he ordered.
Maddy lowered the window and I threw my hands out, and then leaned over and puked.
We were still going fast enough I knew jumping out of the car would hurt: twenty miles an hour? My knees were in Maddy’s lap and she was swearing as she held the back of my shirt.
There was a square nearby. I spotted it between shorter buildings in a light lime green façade.
I dramatically started heaving my stomach even more, gasping for air, waiting for a gap in the traffic so I wouldn’t get run over. Then I scrabbled forward, pretending to throw up and hurled myself out of the car, throwing my hands up over my head.
I bounced, head over heels, my back sliding against asphalt. It hurt. It hurt worse than the time I fell off my bike going downhill with the broken brakes and pitched off the front.
When I sat up on the road, I had to grab the air back from outside my lungs with a deep sucking breath of air, and everything around me was blurry.
But I was out the car.
Alan was out of the door. “Where are you going? We have the ticket, Kadie. What are you doing?”
“I want my phone call!” I screamed. And then I noticed the gun in his hand.
I wobbled up to my feet and ran across the oncoming traffic, tripping over the sidewalk at the end as horns blared at me and Alan jumped back to avoid getting run over.
This was insanity. But I didn’t trust them. I had to trust myself here. I had to talk to my parents. To someone.
He’d had a gun in his hand. The realization had taken a moment to trickle down to me, as I’d just run. He’d had a gun. These people were no different than Just Rahim; they wanted to use violence to force me into something.
I ran away from the main road, shoving my way past people, bouncing off them, not paying attention to all the yelling in Spanish. I just wanted to get as far from the cars and Yggdrasil Corporation as fast as I could, then figure out what to do next.
***
I stopped when I fetched up against a large market, full of people selling fruit, postcards, handcrafts, whatever they could. Tourists slowly wandered about, and buses sat around the edge of the market, engines idling and coughing smoke out their tailpipes.
All around me, the machine-gun like sounds of Spanish filled the air. I realized I didn’t understand anything except for the occasional, halting questions being asked by sunburnt, out-of-breath tourists that I passed by.
I had run out of breath faster than normal. I was wheezing, and my back and head hurt fierce. But I forced myself to concentrate. I stood near an alley for a while, panting. The sour smell of garbage leaked around me, and I stood by myself as the crowds of people wandered by me.
Several boys in raggedy, but bright clothes passed by, looking me over. I didn’t recognize what they were saying, but I could tell they were curious and considering hassling me. For a second I was scared, thinking about the beatings put down on me back home by similar packs of wandering packs like this. But then I thought about Yggdrasil and ignored them, not even caring anymore. A beating would be the least of my troubles. I didn’t have anything in my pockets to steal anyway.
As if sensing this, they moved on, leaving me alone.
How was I going to get in touch with my parents if they were in a hospital? Would they have their phones with them?
I started walking. I was going to need help. I needed… Auntie Fixit, I realized. I could ask for help. She would know what to do. I just had to get in touch, and someone would know where I was.
I stopped near a stall selling postcards. “Telefona publica?” I asked.
Somewhere, I imagined my Spanish teacher laughing at my bad accent. But the old woman sitting on the chair in front of a plywood table seemed to understand me and pointed at the far edge of the market.
The phones, when I finally got to them, were old and beat up. When I put the headset to my ear the sound of the dialtone made me sink against the large metal side of the phone with relief.
I pressed 0.
The woman who answered spoke so quickly I flinched. “Habla ingles?” I asked desperately.
“No ingles,” she said.
I’d reached the end of my Spanish. I could order a beverage, now, or something to eat. I could pay the bill, or ask how she was doing. That was it.
I forced myself to flip on through what little vocabulary I had in my head. “Necesito… ingles, por favor. Por favor. Necisito habla con mi padre and mi madre.” I made myself sound as pathetic as I could imagine.
It wasn’t that hard.
The operator consulted with someone, just out of earshot. And then a voice tentatively said, “Ah, hello?”
“Please,” I said. “I need to make a collect call. It’s an emergency.” I rattled off Auntie Lynn’s number.
She’d know what to do, I knew it.
When she accepted the collect call I’d never been so grateful to hear her voice. “Auntie Lynn!”
“Kadie! We all watching the news. We hoping to see you. You okay?” She started listing who all had piled into the house to watch.
“Please, Auntie Lynn: I think they kidnapped me.”
That stopped her. “Who kidnapped you?”
“Them. The company. Yggdrasil. I’m in Quito, I don’t have any money, and I ran from the car. They had guns.”
“Child…” Auntie Lynn paused. “Kadie, this had better not be no joke, you hear? Because…”
“Have you talked to mom and dad? They were in an accident. They said to do this. They want me in the All Tree. They say it what’s best for all. But these people–“
Something clicked and a smooth male voice joined us. “Kadie Stephens, please stay where you are.”
My mouth dried up. Yggdrasil had found me. Through the phones. Like I was someone on the run in a spy thriller.
“Who this is?” Auntie Lynn demanded, outraged. “Now you listen, what is going on here?”
“It will all be explained shortly,” the voice said. “Someone is coming to your house shortly. Kadie, please relax-“
I hung up and looked around. I didn’t see anyone yet, but I walked around the market. If Yggdrasil could find me on a phone call that quickly, they could probably find the phone’s location, too. I needed to run.
But where, and to do what?
I stopped an old tourist couple near a booth of trinkets. They looked at me, and before I could say anything, they shook their head. “We’re sorry, no money.”
“I don’t want money,” I snapped. “I got separated from my parents: I need to make a phone call. I was supposed to be at Mitad Del Mundo, to see it all happen, you know?”
I was betting they were here, like all the other tourists, to gape at the space elevator spun from the All Tree’s belly all the way down to Earth. “I was hoping I could use your cellphone,” I finished.
They looked at each other skeptically. I was hoping the details about Mitad Del Mundo had sold them, but maybe it hadn’t.
“You can stand on either side of me,” I told them. “You can even hold my wrist, or hold the phone up to my ear. I just… please, need to call.”
The old man finally shrugged and gave me the cellphone, but watched me like a chickenhawk hovering in the air.
“Auntie Lynn!” I knew there’d be others on the phone, listening in again. “I just want to know mom and dad are okay. I just want to know what to do.”
“Kadie; listen,” she told me through the tinny cellphone. “I don’t have any easy answers for you. We’ll try to help no matter what choice you make…”
The connection died. I stood holding the quiet phone as three black cars with tinted windows pulled up to the public phones.